A wide variety of applications rely on tools based on superabrasive cutting elements. These applications range from sawing and drilling through hard materials such as stone, masonry, concrete, and metal, to conditioning the pads used in chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) of silicon wafers for semiconductors. Each application requires different types of superabrasive tools and places different demands upon those tools. In order to better match tool performance with the demands of each application, tool manufacturing processes would benefit from methods that allow more effective control over the characteristics of each tool.